On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 08:39:01PM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote: > On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Alexander Motin <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dan Naumov wrote: > >> Alexander, since you seem to be experienced in the area, what do you > >> think of these 2 for use in a FreeBSD8 ZFS NAS: > >> > >> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H > >> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H&IPMI=Y > > > > Unluckily I haven't yet touched Atom family close yet, so I can't say > > about it's performance. But higher desktop level (even bit old) ICH9R > > chipset there is IMHO a good option. It is MUCH better then ICH7, often > > used with previous Atoms. If I had nice small Mini-ITX case with 6 drive > > bays, I would definitely look for some board like that to build home > > storage. > > > > -- > > Alexander Motin > > CPU-performance-wise, I am not really worried. The current system is > an Atom 330 and even that is a bit overkill for what I do with it and > from what I am seeing, the new Atom D510 used on those boards is a > tiny bit faster. What I want and care about for this system are > reliability, stability, low power use, quietness and fast disk > read/write speeds. I've been hearing some praise of ICH9R and 6 native > SATA ports should be enough for my needs. AFAIK, the Intel 82574L > network cards included on those are also very well supported?
That's just the thing -- I/O transactions, not to mention ZFS itself, are CPU-bound. If you start seeing slow I/O as a result of the Atom's limitations, I don't think there's anything that can be done about it. Choose wisely. :-) WRT the Intel 82574 series: em(4) supports this, just please be sure to run RELENG_8 as there's been em(4) fixes and improvements which RELEASE doesn't have. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/e1000/ If you have issues with the NIC(s), Jack Vogel at Intel can be of great assistance. :-) -- | Jeremy Chadwick [email protected] | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
